bloof books: news: FIRST THE BURNING by Catie Rosemurgy

First the Burning, "dark" cover art: typescript, matches,
compressed charcoal, eraser, fire, river water

First the Burning, "light" cover art: typescript, matches,
compressed charcoal, eraser, fire, river water

First the Burning

Catie Rosemurgy

July 2018
7 x 7 | 42 pages
$8

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CHOOSE A COVER STYLE: If you have a preference for the cover style, please indicate in "notes to seller" during checkout. (If you ordered before we added "light" on 8/4/18 you will receive "dark.")

Cover art: typescript, matches, compressed charcoal, eraser, fire, river water
Giclée print on Mohawk i-Cream Eco Tone 80 lb cover
Laser-print interior on cream 70 lb text
Hand sewn in natural twine

Limited to 150 numbered copies

BLOOF BOOKS CHAPBOOK SERIES
Volume 3: Issue 7 (2018)
ISSN 2373-163X

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FIRST THE BURNING begins with a girl emerging soot-smeared from a river, having miraculously survived a fire that engulfed everything for miles. "Every so often there's a fire that changes everything," she explains. But what if that fire somehow returns to burn again, impossibly, every day? What happens to the girl who survives, who does she become? As she persists in the cycle of daily disaster, she begins to wonder if there is more than one girl, herself and another, a not-quite twin, in her perpetually scorched surroundings. Every day as the townspeople are "strung onto the fire like beads," we lose track of which fire is raging now, and which girl in these burning woods is which.

Excerpt:

They say that just before the fire arrived, animals came pouring silently
out of the forest, all kinds together, heading to the river, “enemies and friends,”
their tongues hanging out.

For days before, the sun was “red” and “swollen,”
“many times its normal size.”
The moon was “not itself.”

The earth is always showing us how to have the wildest experiences.
While she runs, I remain still and mark her trail
like an axe blaze on a tree.

Also this: up close, her pupil moves quickly,
like a whole other creature living in her head.
If you don’t know what I mean, maybe it’s been too long
since you’ve had a friend.

Haven’t you ever been a rough, rough man a hundred miles away
from even a scrap of soft cloth to rub against your skin?
Then you look down and see a bolt of silk.

Not once such a man? I don’t believe you.

--

About the author:

Catie Rosemurgy is the author of two books of poems, My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, both from Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the College of New Jersey. First the Burning is an excerpt from a longer book in progress, The Forthcoming Disasters of Gold River.